The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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March 29, 2011

On Sunday night I had two tasks, the first to send off my census form - after struggling through pages for Person 1 and Person 3, how they are related and how many bedrooms they have - and the second to finish a short piece on Cicero's speech, Pro Archia.

Poor old Archias, a Syrian immigrant and Cicero's former poetry teacher, was in deep trouble in 62 BC. Was he legal or not? Was he a citizen or not? He had got himself stuck in a row between two big beasts of the Roman jungle, Lucullus and Pompey. He was a flatterer by trade but it wasn't easy even for the smartest foreign poet to please everyone all the time.

Archias lacked the proper paperwork. His citizenship records had been destroyed by war - an early version of the 'cat ate my homework' defense. But worse than that, he had then missed the census. He had been abroad with Lucullus at the time. How was he going to get out of that?

Not even Cicero could pretend that a man had filled in his census form when he had not. So he had to deliver a brilliant passage of distraction (Confirmatio B, as the scholars call it), describing all the virtues of poets and poetry for a civilised state, once a key text for the Renaissance and the only part of the speech that anyone now remembers.

March 20, 2011

A friend from New York calls and says that she has just read an essay about one.

She was not deliberately setting out to follow a distant row about whether a TV creator of rural fantasy should be suspended from work for not including ethnic minorities in his Midsomer Murders. See past post: and much else besides.

My friend had merely stumbled on our little English spat after reading the latest elegant edition of Lapham's Quarterly in which an English writer called Peter Stothard had written an essay about Roman slavery, beginning with a bucolic idyll starring a black woman slave. She just followed the links.

Did I have any comment about that?

OK, OK.

This is the link to the Lapham piece. Its opening concerns the Latin poem called Moretum, a minor bucolic idyll once thought to be by Virgil, in which a woman called Scybale helps a poor Italian farmer make pesto for his breakfast.

It is a delicate little poem, successful in a limited way as I tried to describe. Though nothing like as powerful as the least of Virgil's Eclogues, his genuine subversive versions of the idyll, (nor in any way intending to be) it is a useful example of a genre in which the known and the unknown, the familar and the unfamiliar, recognisable fact and created fantasy are kept in artful balance.

In the Lapham Quarterly essay, I likened Moretum to the country cottage decoration of a china cup. But, if I had been prescient, I could have used Midsomer Murders instead, a show which after this week's fuss will doubtless become a little different, a little less exclusively white.

For the sake of all who enjoy it, I hope MM will be more successful than ever, overcoming the perils of introducing artistic change for reasons of greater reality alone, remembering always that 'latet anguis in herba', as one might say.

Meanwhile, try a copy of Lapham's Quarterly - a wonderfully artful concept in itself, like nothing that we have here on this side of the Atlantic, and like most good things a vivid reflection of the character of its creator.

March 15, 2011

I don't suppose I have watched many more episodes of Midsomer Murders than the new BBC Chairman, Chris Patten has watched Eastenders. I know that my elderly mother is a big fan. So are millions of others

Such Midsomers as I've seen make a gentle modern example of the 'bucolic idyll', the genre of country life fantasy directed at people who do not live in the country, showing a world that does not exist, often never existed, but which, ever since the time of Theocritus, has been satisfying and pleasurable for many.

This week the creator of the long-running series has been suspended for saying that he did not consider Midsomer parts for blacks and asians. 'It wouldn't work', said David True-May, if the illusion of the English village were broken by their presence. Most newspapers carried the story this morning.

I had never heard before of Mr True-May. If I had done, I would certainly have felt gratitude to him for the pleasure he has brought my mother. He has created a potent and pleasurable illusion that 'works', I will guess, precisely because it is illusory. That is how the bucolic always works.

Ths creation of satisfying illusion is a task, one would have thought, for which the bosses of ITV were greatly less suited than their now abused producer. When Mr True-May said that ethnic minorities in Midsomer would 'deter viewers', he was talking about a popular fiction not a place. His offending remark was precisely in that context, pointing out that the real countryside was 'cosmopolitan' and his own creation was not.

Was he saying that his viewers would be deterred by black faces in the street? No. Only that they might easily be deterred from watching his show if it didn't work so well. 'Not working well' is a common reason why drama fails. The single most important fact about an idyll is that it is not a depiction of real life. Since Midsomer is a village with apparently some two murders a week, this should not be hard to grasp.

March 13, 2011

When I woke up in the County Hotel, Chelmsford, on Friday after the Essex Book Festival event for Spartacus Road, the insect-like TV was showing news pictures, taken from the air, of a tidal wave rolling across fields towards a distant road of cars.

The last house I ever owned in Essex was beyond the flood defences; and, whenever I slept there, in the bird sanctuaries of St Osyth, I would often imagine the sea storming over our heads. So did others. It was not a popular house for visitors.

So somehow the first pictures from Japan seemed reasonable - even appropriate - for an Essex boy returning home.

It would be good to see them again. No scene of destruction can match a moving wave and a line of drivers with no sense that something bad is five fields away..

All images of a flood are in their essence 'befores and afters', a genre that we carry around in our heads. What was it like? What is it like now? The 'before and after' used to be a standard trope of journalism - but never can it have been deployed as inexorably as in these ABC pictures I've just picked up - late, I'm sure.

And how pleasant it must be for Colonel Gaddafi. Nothing he does to rebel towns looks much compared to the devastation of Japan. Imagine him sliding back between these befores and these afters and feeling both virtuous and human.

March 01, 2011

At Golders Green crematorium this morning we paid our last respects to Martin Landau, a great West End theatrical impresario of the1950s and 1960s and one of the last links to the influential theatre figures driven to Britain by the Nazi persecution of German Jews.

A prolific producer of plays and musicals, whose collaborators included the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein and Margaret Thatcher's playwright speechwriter, Sir Ronald Millar, he brought the novels of C.P. Snow and the musical, Robert and Elizabeth to the West End stage. But he was a man who never forgot that he had been 'born twice', the first time in Berlin in October 1924 to a family of Jewish jewellers and the second time in England in March,1939, when he arrived alone at Victoria station with a green velvet identifying label and a few pieces of his cello smashed en route by the Gestapo.

Landau's foster parents were Oxford Quakers with whom he learnt the English language and a deep love of England. He later served in the RAF in North Africa and began his stage career in 1945 by building a theatre in Wadi Halfa, Sudan. After training as a director at the RADA, he became a champion of regional repertory theatre in the 1950s and put on dozens of plays in Rochdale, Stockport, Cleethorpes, Bridlington as well as London and Glasgow. He believed that the decline of regional 'rep' was a major loss to the British theatre, one which he blamed on the growth of the Arts Council and the accompanying culture of subsidy.

His West End productions included shows starring Leslie Henson and Dandy Nichols; he helped to launch the career of Patrick MacGoohan whose role in Philip King's Serious Charge, apioneering study of homosexual blackmail, was highly praisedby Orson Welles in 1955.One of his biggest hits was The Masters, a 1964 adaptation of the novel by C.P.Snow about the competition between two dons, a traditionalist and moderniser,to become the Master of a Cambridge College.

The playwright who adapted The Masters was Ronald Millar who became Landau's closest lifetime friend. With the composer, Ron Grainer, they went on to produce the musical Robert and Elizabeth, based on the story ofthepoet lovers,Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. The show, directed by Wendy Toye, starred Keith Michell and another of Landau's close friends, Sir John Clements, and ran for almost a thousand performances from October 1964.

In 1966, as theatre producers began to grapple with the 'youth culture' of the age, Landau and Millar worked with Brian Epstein on the musical On the Level whose subject was a school scandal in which pupils receievd the right answers before they had sat their examinations.The Times linked On the Level with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Charlie Girl as developments of which most emphatically it did not approve.

The production and its 'teenage Martians', as The Times described them, opened in Liverpool, the home of the Epstein music empire. Landau was impressed by his partner's skills with the media, less so with his equal preference for grapplingwith a Spanish boy bull-fighter when he was supposed to glad-handing the mayor. The two men had cooperated succesfully on a season of plays in Dublin but fell into dispute over the price that Epstein wanted to charge the On the Level production for the London theatre whose lease Epstein himself held. For Landau this was not a happy experience.

Landau had always had an acute sense of politics and an ability to see through the cant of politicians. When Millar became the most significant of thespeech-writers and presentational advisers for Margaret Thatcher, Landau lent his friend his political as well as theatrical instincts. The two men spoke on the telephone almost every night until Millar's death in 1998 - and as the crematorium audience heard today, many of Millar's greatest speaches for Thatcher came in cooperation with Landau's very remarkable and penetrating mind.

Landau was an inspired and devoted teacher of the dramatic arts, working with pupils almost up to his death, many of whom thanked him today. Some of his life remained mysterious to the end - and there was much exchanging of notes in the tea-room. His extended theatrical family, centred on the actors' agent and producer, Audrey and Joanne Benjamin, who became the third family of his life. He died with Libya in his mind and on his lips, Joanne told us. He had long been a watchful student of resurgent anti-semitism and Islamic extremism in the Middle East, who never forgot the 31 members of his first family who died in Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz - and the mountains of gold and jewellery which his parents and their fellow Jews of Breslau had first to bring to the black-uniformed men at the town hall.